While other scientists are dubious, the author of the latest study called the findings promising, according to an article on Healthday.com.

“The dogs are certainly recognizing the odor of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells,” said French researcher Jean-Nicolas Cornu at Hospital Tenon in Paris.

The problem, he said, is that “we do not know what this molecule is, and the dog cannot tell us.”

But if it can be made to work, it would mark an improvement over the current form of detection. Prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood tests administered to some 30 million American men each year are rife with false positives.

To conduct this study, two researchers spent a year training a Belgian Malinois shepherd to differentiate between urine samples from men with prostate cancer and men without.Read more…

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